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The approach of school opening fills most parents with mixed emotions. They prize the time they have been able to connect with their children, but they welcome the return to school. We should, too.
School opening should be the cause for celebration for society because it is one of the few common, collective social experiences we have. As such, it is a counterforce to an increasingly fragmented social experience. Connections via social media are still connections though the nature and content of the interactions among people are limited. Online gaming, for example, is a social experience among people who might not otherwise see one another face-to-face, but the experience itself is constrained by technology and the content.
School closures during COVID-19 made us acutely aware of the isolation and loneliness that many experienced. COVID-19 also heightened appreciation of teachers.
Both loneliness and social isolation are linked to negative cognitive and health outcomes for individuals. School mitigates them for the individual. But schools do much more.
What one learns in school is quite different from what one learns at home. Home-schooled children may develop the capacity to read and reason. Home schooled children are often not exposed to the social, linguistic, economic, and cultural diversity characteristic of most schools.
Schools help us to learn that our experiences are like the experiences of many others. They expose students to norms of behaviour that are necessary to regulate social interaction in groups larger than the family. In school we learn to care for, and associate with, people outside one’s kinship group.
Schools are environments with achievement standards that are universally applied to all similarly situated students save the few whose performance is impeded by physical, emotional, or cognitive limitations not under their control.
It is in school that students also learn the difference between the position (teacher) and the person occupying the position (Ms Singh, Mr. Frederickson, etc.).
In a conversation with a business acquaintance about these capacities that schools develop she said, “you mean the value-added component of schooling.” I said I was reluctant to use that term because it implied that these capacities added value to the formal curriculum. From my perspective these capacities and the capacities developed by the formal curriculum are central to what schools contribute to the development of the individual. It is through the development of these capacities (and others) in the individual that what we call society is maintained.
The dramatic increase in access to information that the internet has made possible has not diminished the importance of schools to society. It is precisely the opposite. The pervasiveness of largely unmediated content, the ability to transmit that content without critical reflection, and the fragmentation that social media and the internet make possible heightens the importance of institutions that help bind us to one another.
Schools are, for most, a unifying force in a society that is
increasingly fragmented and socially isolated. We should celebrate the contribution
that they make to our society.